Arch Linux

I can't duplicate your bug. I grabbed brain0's RC beryl packages, which I assume was the ones you were talking about. pacman3 -Rcs worked without a hitch. Lets try this:
pacman3 --debug -Rcs beryl-core > pacman.debug.txt
pacman3 --debug=3 -Rcs beryl-core > pacman.debug3.txt

And then attach them here.

Here ya go.

In my eyes, the pacman debug is quite useless, since i actually dont know which package the functions are working on.

The valgrind output by far gives more information, though, still not at which package it hang up. Could be that something is expected to be in the package files. Somehow, it smells like a null pointer at strcmp, a corrupt package body or something similar.

Here's my suspicions:
If you look at the valgrind output, it fails with something like "0x200 is not a valid address for strcmp". Well, 0x200 is way too non-random for me. To me, this says something like the following happened:

struct blah
{
char foo[1024];
int bar;
};

struct blah b;
strcpy(b.foo, "package-foo");
b.bar = 0x200;


struct blah *p = &b;
p += 1; //oops?

Just a random guess though - codemac when you have about an hour or two free at night sometime, let me know in IRC and we can go mondo-debug on this thing.